bot had better check his own couplings.

Huhuh. You said "couplings".

Wasn't someone frothing in here (or linking to said froth) the other day about the Sodomist conspiracy? How W had sold out to it for ... well, whatever one gets in return.

Re Nuttswack ... it's funny how these things happen, isn't it, all that theorizing about power inevitably seems to lead to wanting access to some of it.

There's this academic disease when it comes to relevance. Write critically (and often well), tenure, move to elite university, then govt or think tank job. Then they come back to the academy full of themselves and suddenly not so critical (my small-n observation anyway).

I was doing okay, and ready for your next Hurl Check, until I read that letter from Luttwak to the TLS that LWM just posted.

Now I'm going to have to go lie down.

The first post, Rumsfeld's saying how our appreciation of the threat in this country is so low, gave me this image of Rumsfeld as Bush Pere in the grocery store discovering the wonders of a bar code scanner for the first time. To de bode of em, it's like, "Do you get out much? At all? Ever?"

To the second, Lippsmak's letter: I am stunned, really. Speechless. It was a clean war? Is he insane?

I guess it's also news to me that he was there 'helping villagers defend themselves'.

Pere Ubu was/is so, I guess I'm not a fan

Well, you won't be impressed by my/our tie-in then (and I'll just put it back in the drawer). Pere Ubu was one of the great post-punk bands that spontaneously emerged in Cleveland mid-late 70s, I thought since we were talking Ohio ...

My good friend is about 13 years ahead of your bride but they've probably swam in the same puddles and...

probably both worked at Cedar Pointe in the summers too, I'll wager.

These are some great memories, which I will have to share with the Bride when she gets home.

Also, with her oldest sister, who's the same age as your extra-special good buddy, another CP summer worker whom it would not be a surprise to learn your ESGB was acquainted with.

She lives in Manhattan now; we had a great celebration last fall for her 60th, a big gathering upstate where we pondered all the ways the world has changed. And, suitably enough, drank way too much.

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/4913.html.

Some additional info, background for forwarding to yo' friends

it's Parsley, not Paisley...

Definitely not coming to your house for dinner until THAT one's straightened out. :>

Have not commented the last few days, but I am truly digging the Republican Superfriends! You are on a roll here, and obviously having a good time with it. Don't stop!

At some point in the last few days, after the third or fifth or I don't know, maybe twentieth mention of your height, be it real or imagined, I got Liz Phair's "6'1" stuck in my head, and it's been looping more or less constantly ever since.

Happily, I like the song. :>

Jebbie, I've already forwarded that one to my brother in law, who flew Fokkers (the modern, non-aggressive kind) for a small midwestern airline (later absorbed) for many years before falling hard for a Saab. By the end of this week, everyone at Northwest will have heard that story. Y'dun good.

Jebbie, it's just like before, only add several extracurricular hours of violin, karate, French and hedge funds for tykes. Also, helmets, Facebook and Twitter. And noise, pretty much all the time.

That, my friend, was priceless.

Even by your generally priceless standard.

The Bride returns, and I do a historical-data-dump. She returns the favor with a stream, largely incomprehensible to me, about her aunt's cabin on North Bass, now taken over by DNR, and the old car that is still there from when they drove it across the lake, back when it still froze. She says they had turned the Breakers into the workers' dorms by the time she arrived. There's more, but it's making my head hurt.

I'm thinking about Pedinska's fresh basil now. Thai, and 'Murican. Ours is growing like gangbusters in its bucket ... we haven't learned our way around the clay and the steep slope of our backyard, so for now it's buckets ... and the fresh mint we use for Juleps. No thyme. But maybe one of these first fine rains ...

check out tinyurl.com ... works very well.

From your mouth to Friedman's sponsors' ears.

The invocation of anyone's 'mouth' or 'ears' in the context of that stumbling blind thing plants the inevitable imagery suggesting their possible interactions ... but you knew that, right?

I know, you're just warming up. Clearing your throat (ahem) for a fresh new Hurl Check! :>